I noticed when you plot that the first line is blue, then orange, then green, and so on.
Is there some way to access this list of colours? I’ve seen a million posts on how to change the colour cycle or access the iterator, but not on how to just get the list of colours that matplotlib cycles through by default.
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Answer
In matplotlib versions >= 1.5, you can print the rcParam called axes.prop_cycle:
print(plt.rcParams['axes.prop_cycle'].by_key()['color']) # [u'#1f77b4', u'#ff7f0e', u'#2ca02c', u'#d62728', u'#9467bd', u'#8c564b', u'#e377c2', u'#7f7f7f', u'#bcbd22', u'#17becf']
Or equivalently, in python2:
print plt.rcParams['axes.prop_cycle'].by_key()['color']
In versions < 1.5, this was called color_cycle:
print plt.rcParams['axes.color_cycle'] # [u'b', u'g', u'r', u'c', u'm', u'y', u'k']
Note that the default color cycle changed in version 2.0.0 http://matplotlib.org/users/dflt_style_changes.html#colors-in-default-property-cycle